Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Combating Narratives: Soldiering In Twentieth-Century African American And Latinx Literature, Stacy Reardon

Doctoral Dissertations

The neglect of the stories of African American and Latinx soldiers of color, combined with the relative absence of direct testimony by such soldiers, is very much on the minds of writers who achieve what Toni Morrison calls a “literary archeology” that fills in the gaps of the historical record. By closely examining John Oliver Killens’s And Then We Heard the Thunder, Alfredo Véa’s Gods Go Begging, and John Edgar Wideman’s Two Cities: A Love Story, in this study I argue that twentieth-century African American and Latinx war fiction penned between the start of the Civil Rights …

Ownership And Writer Agency In Web 2.0, Thomas Pickering

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation explores what it means for writers to maintain agency and ownership over their textual productions in big data age, where to write means to participate in a complex weave of software, code, and networked algorithms, and where writing produces both conventional text and data. Given how much everyday writing flows through proprietary digital platforms, my dissertation asks: how can we carve out a model of ownership that centers the agency of writers and users in the face of corporate web platforms that aggressively appropriate the value of our textual productions? Digital writing scholarship has responded by appealing to …

Espacios En Disputa: Crónica De Desplazamientos Y Reocupación Urbana En El Raval Y El Casc Antic De Barcelona (1964-2014), Elisabet Pallas

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation analyzes plays and documentary films that illustrate the forced displacement of urban citizens from Barcelona’s oldest neighborhoods El Raval and El Casc Antic between 1964 and 2014. Grounded on theories from Sociology and Urban and Cultural Studies, the project surveys the various political mechanisms that enforce and legitimize the territorial, cultural, and corporeal expropriations that deploy tactics such as the criminalization of poverty and the passing of local laws restricting the use of public spaces. Through a close analysis of documentaries such as Ciutat Morta (Ortega y Artigas, 2014), El forat (Peña, 2004), En construcción (Guerín, 2001), …

All Sortals Are Phase Sortals, Justin Mooney

Doctoral Dissertations

Contemporary metaphysics is dominated by the view that every object belongs to a kind permanently in the sense that it cannot cease to belong to that kind without thereby ceasing to exist. For example, some philosophers think that a person is destroyed if they cease to be a person, a statue is destroyed if it ceases to be a statue, and so on. I believe that this standard view is false. Being a person, or a statue, or etc., is like being a child: just as I did not cease to exist when I ceased to be a child, so …

The Burdens And Blessings Of Responsibility: Duty And Community In Nineteenth- Century America, Leslie Leonard

Doctoral Dissertations

The Burdens of Responsibility traces the emergence of moral responsibility as both a concept and problem in the nineteenth-century United States. Drawing on a range of sources –works of literature, philosophy, domestic manuals, newspaper archives – I show how many Americans began to conceive of moral responsibility as distinct from both duty and rules of behavior prescribed by traditional social roles. Although ethicists today take this distinction for granted, it was an emergent and problematic space in the nineteenth-century United States, brought into being by historical forces, including the rise of market capitalism, abolition, changing women’s roles, and increasing concern …

Rules Of Recognition: Indigenous Encounters With Society And The State, Erica Kowsz

Doctoral Dissertations

For Indigenous peoples, being recognized has come to mean not simply being known and acknowledged by one’s own relations but also being seen in the right way by the eye of authority. For decades, to gain access to the resources, rights, and legitimacy that state recognition confers, Indigenous political actors globally have navigated bureaucratic processes, from court proceedings to paperwork petitions. While the notion of Indigenous rights emerged at a global scale, they are specified in national jurisdictions. Indigenous people confront problems of their recognizability at all scales in their everyday lives and where they engage with state processes determining …

A Metaphysics Of Artifacts: Essence And Mind-Dependence, Tim Juvshik

Doctoral Dissertations

My dissertation explores the nature of artifacts – things like chairs, tables, and pinball machines – and addresses the question of whether there is anything essential to being an artifact and a member of a particular artifact kind. My dissertation offers new arguments against both the anti-essentialist and current essentialist proposals. Roughly put, the view is that artifacts are successful products of an intention to make something with certain features constitutive of an artifact kind. The constitutive features are often functional features, but may include structural, material, aesthetic, and other features. I further explore the ways in which artifacts are …

“They Can Only Be Influenced By Their Fears”: Redefining White Mob Violence Against Blacks, 1898 – 1917, Riots Or Pogroms?, Deroy C. Gordon

Doctoral Dissertations

The aim of this dissertation is to help to redefine racial riots carried out against the African American community in the United States during the 19^th and the early 20^th century. I provide an examination to argue for those racial riots to be redefined as pogroms rather than riots. Racial riots that had been carried out against the African American community in the United States often did not get the attention they deserve. The initial framing of those attacks as riots, made it difficult for black victims of those racial riots to seek legal redress or request government …

Redefining Gender Violence: Radical Feminist Visions In Contemporary Ethnic American Women’S Fiction And Women Of Color Activism 1990-2010, Hazel Gedikli

Doctoral Dissertations

Redefining Gender Violence: Radical Feminist Visions in Contemporary Ethnic American Women’s Fiction and Women of Color Activism 1990-2010 reconceptualizes state-sanctioned family disintegration as gender violence, most recently evidenced in the forced separation of the central Latin American asylum-seekers at the US-Mexico border. It frames family separation as part of ongoing settler colonial history and delineates the gendered aspects of this form of state violence. More specifically, Redefining Gender Violence articulates a theory of gendered logic of dispossession through analyzing the novelistic representations of family (dis)integration by Native and Black authors and resistance strategies offered by women of color (WOC) activist …

Science Fiction’S Enactment Of The Encouragement, Process, And End Result Of Revolutionary Transformation, Katharine Blanchard

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines contemporary science fiction texts with utopian impulses through the lens of Marxist literary theory to show how these texts enact the encouragement, process, and end result of revolutionary transformation. The interdisciplinary theoretical framework of this dissertation utilizes Tom Moylan’s analysis of critical utopias, Darko Suvin’s theory of cognitive estrangement, Fredric Jameson’s concept of cognitive mapping, theories of postcapitalism from the sociological, economic, and political fields, the findings presented in Why Civil Resistance Works, and Erik Olin Wright’s definitions of the ruptural, interstitial, and symbiotic strategies of revolutionary transformation. The analysis of Dissidence, Insurgence, Emergence …

Conjuring New Worlds: Black Women’S Speculative Fiction And The Restructuring Of Blackness, Chloe Hunt

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation, Conjuring New Worlds: Black Women’s Speculative Fiction and the Restructuring of Blackness, examines Black speculative fiction as a site of theorization within worlds where Black existence has not already been pre-determined by the forces of slavery and ideologies of race and culture in a white supremacist world. In this sense, my dissertation models ways of reading Black literature that demonstrates how Blackness can disturb, rather than reproduce, notions of racial meaning and the Human. I argue that writers of Black speculative fiction go beyond the creation of alternative realities to produce sites that allow for nearly limitless …

Marked At Sea: Race, Class, And Tattoo Culture In Melville's Early Sea Fiction, Connell D. Swenson

Masters Theses

This thesis explores the role of Euromerican maritime tattoos in Herman Melville’s early sea fiction. Through layers of historic and scholarly obfuscation, Euromerican maritime tattoos have been delimited to a marginal role in the cosmopolitan shipboard culture of 19^th-century Pacific whaling and trade networks. This project extracts and contextualizes that cultural practice as formative in the creation of sailors’ hybrid embodied identities. With this intervention in mind, Euromerican maritime tattooing emerges as a small but important feature in Melville’s first six books. Probing issues such as race, class, slavery, and colonialism, this project deploys an intimate reading practice, …

Heavy Metal In Medieval Europe, Sean M. Klimmek

Masters Theses

How and why did plate armor come to be widely used in Medieval Europe? I trace the historical development of armor in Europe from antiquity to the middle ages, and then identify the main causes that pushed European warriors to develop and adopt plate armor from the 14th to the 16th centuries. I rely on prior research by scholars and historians of arms and armor, as well as primary source documents that describe arms and armor and their use in tournaments and on the battlefield. I conclude that a combination of social, political, military, and technical factors pushed European warriors …

Quantitative Character And The Composite Account Of Phenomenal Content, Kimberly Soland

Doctoral Dissertations

I advance an account of quantitative character, a species of phenomenal character that presents as an intensity (cf. a quality) and includes experience dimensions such as loudness, pain intensity, and visual pop-out. I employ psychological and neuroscientific evidence to demonstrate that quantitative characters are best explained by attentional processing, and hence that they do not represent external qualities. Nonetheless, the proposed account of quantitative character is conceived as a compliment to the reductive intentionalist strategy toward qualitative states; I argue that an account of perceptual experience that combines a tracking account of qualitative character with my functionalist proposal of …

Perceptions Of Historical Climate Change And Park Policy: The Impact On The Fremont Cottonwood In Zion National Park, Kathleen Kavarra Corr

Doctoral Dissertations

Despite its “natural” appearance and the Organic Act 1916 mandate for preservation of the natural environment in National Parks, the Virgin River as it flows through Zion National Park’s Zion Canyon was transformed through massive flood control re-engineering projects in the 1930s. The armoring of the river has had significant impacts on riparian vegetation, particularly on the stands of native Fremont Cottonwood trees that once filled the narrow valley. What was the motivation for this massive flood control project carried out in an arid region with less than 15 inches of rain per year? This dissertation explores the motivations which …

Literary Negation And Materialism In Chaucer, Michelle Brooks

Doctoral Dissertations

After the rediscovery of Aristotle’s works on natural science in the thirteenth century, Geoffrey Chaucer’s late fourteenth-century world saw a new interest in materialism with an awareness that materiality also implies loss. “Literary Negation and Materialism in Chaucer” explores the ways particular moments of negation—the imagined absence of a person, thing, or condition—operate in Chaucer’s work and the ways Chaucer deploys such moments as part of a larger pattern of negation that broke with the poetics that preceded him. My methodology grows out of discussions about form, philosophy, science and technology, economics, translation, and materialism. I integrate this interdisciplinary framework …

Digital Indigeneity: Digital Media's Uses For Identity Formation, Education, And Activism By Indigenous People In The Northeastern United States, Virginia A. Mclaurin

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation seeks to examine the types of digital media being produced in the Northeastern United States, its content, the goals and motivations of its creators, the processes underlying Indigenous digital media creation, and the desired and projected audiences of Indigenous digital artists and content creators. Resulting findings from this study illuminate long histories of Indigenous use of digital media tied to digital media's development in Indigenous lands. I argue that Native people have been producers and influencers in film and later, digital media, and have underwritten digital production due to its development on Indigenous lands. Through interviews and media …

Visionary Futures: Science Fiction Theatre For Social Justice Movements, Joshua Glenn-Kayden

Masters Theses

This written portion of my thesis chronicles my experience as director and producer of Visionary Futures: Science Fiction Theatre for Social Justice Movements, in collaboration with playwrights, activists, actors, designers, and a dramaturg.

In this thesis, I explore the process of creating a meaningful thesis project during the Covid-19 pandemic. I discuss the idea of visionary fiction as created by adrienne maree brown and Walidah Imarisha and how to create theatre within that genre. This thesis chronicles the development and production of three new plays of visionary fiction that wrestle with contemporary social issues, all designed for digital performance. I …

The Acquisition Of Advanced Level Chinese Heritage Language (Chl) Learners：A Comparative Analysis Concerning The Aspect Marker “Le了”, Jingjing Ao

Masters Theses

Over the decades, research on heritage language learners has been quite popular, but most studies concern Russian, Spanish and other languages rather than Chinese. The Chinese heritage language learner’s studies focus mainly on K-12 students and their learning motivations, writing characteristics, and identification recognition and those concerned with language acquisition address their vocabulary and verbal Chinese development. There have been very few studies about learning grammar. This study emphasizes on the acquisition of the aspect marker LE among advanced learners.

To investigate the acquisition characteristics of advanced CHL learners, this study adopted the advanced CHL learners as the research group …

'Y Mi Rebelión Se Convirtió En Arte’ Raúl Salinas Y Su Poesía Política: Una Historia Literaria Chicana, Santiago Vidales

Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation I present a literary history of poet and revolutionary Raúl Salinas. Born in 1934, Salinas left a major legacy for Latinx and Chicanx letters. I focus on narrating, for the first time in Spanish, the relationship between his prison radicalism and his poetic production. The time Salinas spent as a political prisoner in Leavenworth Penitentiary (1967-1972) was foundational to his political transformation and (re)education. Along with members of the Black Panthers, AIM, Puerto Rican Nationalists, and other radicalized Chicanos, these inmates formed study groups, networks of support, and established a newspaper to both combat the oppressive conditions …

Black Organizations As A Way To Increase Black Students’ College Attendance Rates By Improving Their Academic Performance At Primary And Secondary Schools, Leydi Mercedes Vidal Perlaza

Doctoral Dissertations

The racial academic achievement gap between Black students and other students is one of the most pressing education-policy challenges faced by the United States. This gap refers to the disparities in standardized test scores between these groups of students. Decades ago, Fordham and Ogbu’s theory about the “burden of acting White” was one of the most cited studies indicating the causes of this achievement gap. This theory indicates that Black students who do not perform well academically, do not want to achieve success at school because it is considered as acting White. However, this is an old way of thinking …

Bitten By The Demon Of Cinema: An Examination Of Women-Made Horror, Erica Tortolani

Doctoral Dissertations

Moving away from a discussion of horror films directed by men, “Bitten by the Demon of Cinema” those films—and, where appropriate, works across media, like on television, the Internet, and in the visual arts—created by women. As I explore in this dissertation, women-made horror has narrative, thematic, and stylistic qualities that borrow from the genre at large but are then transformed into a class of films all of their own. While seemingly diverse, they share enough commonalities to constitute a new mode of filmmaking altogether. The films and filmmakers that I have chosen in this dissertation are cases in point …

Dirty Minds & Failed Endings: Uses Of The Bawdy In Jewish Comedy, American And Israeli Perspectives, Eyal Tamir

Doctoral Dissertations

The connection between Jews, Jewish culture, and comedy in the twentieth century has long been established. The dissertation looks at Jewish comedy, comedians, and comediennes who have made the bawdy a central feature of their work. Moreover, it argues that the bawdy and the lewd have played an important role in the history of Jewish comedy and humor in the United States and in Israel. Aside from simply documenting various uses and occurrences of the bawdy in Jewish comedy, the dissertation seeks out some symptoms, as well as some underlying causes for the proclivity for such material in the work …

Worlds Without End: A Platonist Theory Of Fiction, Patrick Grafton-Cardwell

Doctoral Dissertations

I first ask what it is to make up a story. In order to answer that question, I give existence and identity conditions for stories. I argue that a story exists whenever there is some narrative content that has intentionally been made accessible. I argue that stories are abstract types, individuated by the conditions that must be met by something in order to be a properly formed token of the type. However, I also argue that the truth of our story identity attributions---sentences like, "Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings is the same story as JRR Tolkien's Lord of the …

Viewing Heinrich Schenker Through The Lens Of Disability, Charles Hsueh

Masters Theses

Many scholars have discussed Austrian music theorist Heinrich Schenker (1868-1935). While discourse has mainly focused on Schenkerian analysis, recent scholarship has started to examine the role of Schenker as a person (e.g., Schenker as a Jewish individual, Schenker as a racist, etc.), and how these identities influenced his views on music. Yet, within these new explorations and discussions, the aspect of disability and Schenker as an individual with a disability have not been as seriously examined. After examining his biography through the lens of disability in the introduction (Chapter 1), this thesis discusses disability's influence on Schenker through two additional …

Memory Vague: A History Of City Pop, Jeffrey Salazar

Masters Theses

This thesis gives a definition and chronology of city pop and places it within the context of Japanese history. City pop can be traced from the 1960s folk movement in Japan until its demise in the early 1990s, coinciding with the end of the bubble economy. This thesis also examines the mid-2010s resurgence of interest in city pop among English-speaking internet users, beginning with a nostalgic rediscovery and curation of city pop around the turn of the century by DJs in Japan known as “crate diggers.” City pop was then transmitted to the West through sampling in hip-hop and especially …

A Religião E O Papel Da Mulher Na Desestabilização E Humanização Do Discurso Judaico-Cristão Em Duas Obras De José Saramago: O Evangelho Segundo Jesus Cristo E Caim, Camila C. Santiago

Masters Theses

It is intrinsic to modernity the expansion of the philosophical detachment from the religious view as critical reason takes place in science, art and the worldview of modern man. Through Kant's reflections, in The Religion within the limits of reason alone (1793), we will seek to understand this process of rupture between faith and reason which explains the prevailing thought in postmodernity. We chose the renowned writer, José Saramago, and his works of religious nature as our objects of study, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (1991) and Cain (2009), as they represent, in the Portuguese language, the voice of …

Benjamin Smith Lyman: Geologist At The Intersection Of Hokkaido, Japan, And The United States, Benjamin Ashby

Masters Theses

Benjamin Smith Lyman was a geologist from Northampton, Massachusetts, who was contracted by the Japanese government in 1872 to carry out coal surveys on the island of Hokkaidō 北海道. What started out as a standard geological survey, quickly evolved into a lifelong interest in Japan for Lyman. The large collection of letters, books, photographs, and other documents housed under the Benjamin Smith Lyman Collection at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, serve as a primary source on both early relations between the Japanese and the West and the beginnings of the large network of academic writings which today can be classified …

Grammars Of Identity: Political Languages Of Activism In Argentina And The United States, Ana M. Ospina Pedraza

Doctoral Dissertations

In recent history, democratic popular assemblies have played a significant role in political organizing worldwide. Contemporary theorists and social movement scholars see a global ethos of collective action in the growth of the assembly form. This dissertation studies the language of collective action in two movements that illustrate the global significance of assemblies: the neighborhood assemblies of Buenos Aires in 2002 and the New York General Assembly of Occupy Wall Street in 2011. These movements were connected by transnational networks of activism and a commitment to internal democracy now prevalent in the global left. This research asks two questions: what …

Self-Representation In Selected Poems Of Gu Taiqing (1799-1877), Li-Ting Chang

Masters Theses

Gu Taiqing 顧太清 (1799-1877) is one of the most famous and prolific female writers in the late Qing. In this thesis, I focus on her poems and lyrics on three important subjects, self-portrayals, plum blossoms, and Qingfengge 清風閣 (Clear Breeze Pavilion), in her two poetry collections, Tianyou geji 天遊閣集 (Collected Poems of Heavenly Travels Studio) and Donghai yuge 東海漁歌 (Songs of the Fisherman of the Eastern Sea), in order to advance the current scholarship on this female author and Ming-Qing women’s writings and reveal the uniqueness of Gu’s poetry. My study addresses how she represents herself, recounts her life experiences, …